Thursday, May 6, 2010

The past April 24 the six'th edition of the FLISOL (Latin American Free Software Install Fest) was held in more than 200 cities in Latin America. Mandriva-co was present on the event on Bogotá, doing installations and with a booth. I was in charge of coordinating the instalations and the booth, the idea was to present to people Mandriva Linux and our community, answer people's questions, etc.

We printed 40 Mandriva 2010 One CD's (both KDE and GNOME) and 10 Free DVD's (i586 and x86_64), which turned out to be a really really small amount, as those 50 discs were all sold in like an hour. Then we burned like 30 more which also got sold out in another hour or so, and also gave away around 10 or 15 more to people coming to our booth and asked some questions aboiut Mandriva. Here is a pic of the dics (sorry for the quality but it was taken the night before and I didn't have a more potent light at hand):

We used some really nice covers designed by totti82 from blogdrake.net.

We also desgined a Mandriva promo flyer and printed more than 200 copies that were given out to visitors to Mandriva-co booth during the day. We used this same flyer on SFD but with some minor fixes. If someone likes it, I will be doing a translated version to english in the comming day's and I'll make the svg file available too. I know it isn't the best design but it was made on a hurry for SFD last year:

We installed around 10 or 12 machines, we were a little under-powered this time and couldn't do much more installations compared to other distros. Last year we did around 15 or 16 installs and hoped to increase this number but we were less Mandriva installers for this year. Anyway, any number above 1 is good, right ?

There were a couple of laptops with i3 processors (Intel GM 45 express with intel GMA 4500MHD video accelerator) that we had trouble with the video when booting for the first time after installation. Both laptops would change to a black screen after kernel loading. I suppose this had something to do with speedboot or KMS. We tried disabling speedboot which didn't work and we didn't knew how to disable KMS at the time. If you have ever attended to an install fest you know you have little time to figure out problems and not always all the resourses you would like to have to try to fix them. We ended up installing PCLinuxOS 2010 on one of those laptops as it was the only distro (tried Ubuntu and Fedora too) that gave video after installation, like two minutes after booting up but it worked :D

At the end we ended up having a good time and finished the day with some well deserved beers will all the organizers. Here are some pictures of our booth at the event:

At the left image you can see our Mandriva model, bringing a lot of attention to our booth ;) At the right image you can find me (the one in the center) with Miguel at the right (member of Mandriva-co) and Jorge, that came all the way from a University in El Salvador, and was amazed with Mandriva's ease of use and excellent hardware recognition.